It seems to me that this is a survey course of a recent cutting edge research area with hands on projects. And MIT is an engineering school, which so an applied

It seems to me that this is a survey course of a recent cutting edge research area with hands on projects. And MIT is an engineering school, which so an applied course like this isn't out of place. Also, it's IAP (Independent Activity Period), which is a one month break between semesters. That's just enough time for a very specific course. There's another very specific IAP course in special relativity, for example. Besides, the topics they're covering here, like deep learning, SLAM, image segmentation, etc are useful in many other areas.